Gretl: Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library

for Mac OS X on Intel (X11 version)

Step 0: install X11, if need be (first time only)

If you're running OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), and you don't already
have X11 installed, you'll have to do this first. (X11 came installed
by default on OS X 10.6 and 10.7.) You get X11 from
macosforge.

Step 1: install GTK (first time only)

Some additional libraries are needed to support gretl, namely GTK and friends.
If you are running OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or higher, install
GTK using
GTK2-framework.pkg.
Some notes on this package can be found in GTK.pdf.

If you are running an older version of OS X (10.5 or lower) you should install
this version of GTK
(or alternate download).
Caution: This version of GTK will not work on OS X 10.7 (Lion).

Step 2: install gretl

Now for gretl itself: grab and install either the latest release or the current "snapshot".
The snapshot is more up to date: often it will contain bug-fixes but sometimes it will contain
newly introduced bugs. To see what's new in the snapshot, take a look at the gretl
Change log (the "in progress" entry).

After downloading, double-click on the gretl dmg.gz file to unzip it.
This will produce a dmg file; double-click on that to mount the
disk image. Open the disk image in the Finder and drag Gretl onto Applications.
But note: if you're updating an existing installation of gretl you should
first open Applications in the Finder and delete the old Gretl item.

Once you're done installing gretl you can eject the disk image and delete the dmg and
dmg.gz files.

Trouble?

The gretl disk image is documented in
README.pdf, which contains some suggestions for
trouble-shooting. Briefly, if you want to debug a non-functioning
gretl on OS X, please try this: open an X11 terminal window; change directory
(cd) to Gretl.app (where you installed the package);
change directory to Contents/Resources/bin and run the command

./gretl

This should give you some feedback on what is going wrong.

Optional extras

You may wish to install X-12-ARIMA and/or TRAMO/SEATS. These are specialized programs for
analysis of seasonal time series data, in versions compatible with gretl.